


a timeline

by CopperCaravan



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Codename: Tens, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, also deacon is here for some damn reason, there if you squint anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-08
Updated: 2017-05-08
Packaged: 2018-10-29 11:38:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10853217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CopperCaravan/pseuds/CopperCaravan
Summary: For the RFOBB2017, with art from Dim Horizon. Laurence and Gloria Samson are part of the Brotherhood... and then they aren't, as told by an unreliable and very biased narrator.





	a timeline

**Author's Note:**

> These characters are black. I am not. I did my research and genuinely made my best effort to be mindful, but if I did *anything* wrong or hurtful, please let me know and I will fix it.  
> Also, I'm not sure if I can edit works that I post to collections? But if I can, you can be sure this will have the absolute hell edited out of it because the scope of my plans for these new children of mine did not match my ability, like I wanted so, so much more stuff for them and I've honestly just adopted them over the course of writing them. They're my children now and deserve lots of attention from me.

[Dim Horizon Studio's Instagram](http://68.media.tumblr.com/509068deafebb13bf7daded72aa4a0fb/tumblr_opnp75707r1vqvztio3_1280.jpg)   
[more images from this set uploaded with permission to my blog](http://coppercaravan.tumblr.com/post/160458197448/photo-manips-by-and-posted-with-permission-from)

\---

 

Let’s play a game. Maybe you know it. I’ll tell you something, and you have to decide if it’s the truth or if it’s a lie. Ready? Go!

...

Stories run in time with each other, overlap and intertwine until it becomes impossible to tell one without telling all the rest.

No doubt you’ve heard The Big One, the story of The Wanderer—and wander they did, right out of Vault 111 and into the foreign wasteland of the Commonwealth, into Diamond City, into the Institute, into the most significant moment of most of our lives. They were an unknown variable, a rumour, but they became a legend; they became the story we tell over pints of beer and as we tuck our children into bed. “No need to fear anymore; The Wanderer saved us all.”

_The Wanderer helped us build a water purifier._

_The Wanderer saved my farm from supermutants._

_The Wanderer helped us pay off our debts._

_The Wanderer saved my brother from raiders._

I knew The Wanderer, called them a friend—sometimes more than that—but The Wanderer didn’t save everyone. They couldn’t have, even if they’d wanted to. They were, after all, just a person like the rest of us.

Or well, like most of us.

Like some of us.

But this story isn’t about The Wanderer, so you may be wondering why I’ve brought them up at all. Well, like I said: stories overlap. The Wanderer was, if nothing else, a drop in the ocean. Small compared to everything around them, but there were ripples. Sit back, pal. Prop up your feet. Tonight, I bring you the story of the Samson Siblings.

...

Laurence and Gloria, they were.

Born Gloria and Laurence—Gloria was most definitely born two and a half minutes the elder and you can be sure it irritated her to no end that they became not “Gloria and Laurence” but “Laurence and Gloria”—they grew up in Moss Rock.

Oh, what’s that? You’ve never heard of it?

Of course you haven’t. Moss Rock is about the size of its namesake and there were not one hundred citizens, nor fifty, nor twenty, nor ten. No, Moss Rock’s population consisted of five people, an impressive four Brahmin, and an excessively cantankerous cat. That is my general opinion of cats, but of this one especially so.

A life is more than a series of world-shattering moments, certainly. For example, my life can be measured in all sorts of things: the number of shoes I’ve grown out of, the number of people who say my name with fondness, the number of deaths I’ve lived through, the number of deaths I almost haven’t, the number of times I’ve actually gotten drunk off Bobrov’s Best Moonshine. Still, those world-shattering moments can make or break us. Both, sometimes.

The Wanderer left Vault 111 on October 23rd of 2287, and that moment was the first of many in which they irrevocably altered our world, but Laurence and Gloria had twenty-two years of moments prior to that day. Perhaps more importantly, the Samson Siblings had many, many moments after it as well.

One such moment was on December 17th of 2287 at about three in the afternoon.

...

They say it used to get cold around here, back before the war.

Gloria’s seen pictures of _snow,_ a white blanket coating barns and fields and treetops. She’s read a few books too—just story books, passing mentions of cold wind and falling powder. Never seen it though. Doesn’t snow here nowadays.

Now, when winter comes, it just gets wet. Vaguely cool, but still unbearably humid; makes her hair frizz out like nobody’s business. Laurence finally lost his patience a few years back and keeps his cut short now, but Gloria’ll be damned if the wasteland takes even one more thing from her. Like clockwork, every three weeks, she unwinds her braids and spends about four hours redoing them.

It never took that long when her mother did it.

Sometimes she thinks of asking Laurence to grow his back out; she misses it. Or maybe it’s more that she misses the way their aunt would put her hands on her hips and shake her head and laugh. _“I don’t know how your mother ever told you two apart when you were younger,”_ she’d say.

The same deep brown skin, the same warm eyes, the same smooth, broad noses. And, used to be, the same long hair, plaited in countless braids down their backs.

She watches Laurence from the porch while he ties up a fence post. Damn raiders tore the whole thing down three weeks ago and they haven’t found a single Brahmin since.

“Come take a break,” she calls out.

He doesn’t take much convincing; fair considering he’s been out here since before dawn trying to fix that damn fence. She needs to get back to the crops too, she knows she does...

Laurence wipes away the beading sweat from his forehead and drops into a chair next to her.

“I don’t know how those traders can train those cows so well,” he says, leaning into the back of his seat and tipping his face up into the sun. “Dad told me he even seen one fight off a wild dog once.”

She’s not so sure she believes that. Their father was... prone to exaggeration. A trip to the next farmstead over was often difficult, yes, but to hear him tell it, you’d think the man had gone on the journey of a lifetime—fought off bears and deathclaws and whole raider gangs with nothing but a six-shot pistol.

Those wild tales are another thing she misses.

Laurence laughs. “Ours are just cowards, I think. You get it, Gloria? _Cow_ ards? Because they’re—”

“Shh! Shh...”

There’s something... humming? Almost whirring like an old machine. It’s quiet, barely there, but there’s _something._

“Do you hear that?” She stands up, cranes her head to one side and squints. “Do you hear it?”

She doesn’t wait for his answer, just spins on her heels and walks around to the back of the house, Laurence following behind.

When she and Laurence were very young, their grandmother took them to see a plane. A huge, twisted up pile of debris that Nanna swore could fly back in the days of _her_ Great Gran. Laurence, in his typical fashion, took it all in like it was a bowl of peaches—too excited for thought or questions. But Gloria, in _her_ typical fashion, spent days drilling Nanna on how something like that could possibly fly. She’s studied the structure of bird’s wings and that plane was nothing like the light, hollow bones of a bird. It was heavy and awkward and hard to imagine taking flight even in its original form. There was a certain shape to it though—Gloria could see how it _might_ work, if only she could figure out how to get it in the air to start with.

It was a little seed of a thought, a hollow, pointless dream. She could never repair a plane, could never be in the air the way Nanna said folks used to be. It was nice though, to have that dream to come back to sometimes, when things seemed hopeless and all she wanted was to fly away. Ever since Mama and Papa... well, lately she’s been drifting back into that dream more and more.

But this—this is real, isn’t it? This... this _thing_ in the air, floating toward them.

“Laurence...” It’s barely more than a breath. “Laurence, what...”

“It’s a plane!”

She’s too afraid to look away—surely if she does, it’ll vanish—but she can see Laurence out of the corner of her eye, standing there as bewildered as she is.

It’s not a plane, not exactly. But she doesn’t say so.

They watch, in silence, as the metal giant floats almost gently over the pitiful remains of their farm.

_We are the Brotherhood of Steel,_ it proclaims. _We have come to save the Commonwealth._

...

What a profound moment, right?

But here’s the thing though: the Brotherhood’s airship came and left. And you know what happened then? Laurence and Gloria were in the exact same place they’d been in a moment before: Gloria’s hair was still half undone and Laurence went right back to fixing their fence.

Now, not even a full day before that, my Wanderer had found Conrad Kellogg in an old military fort. They weren’t _my_ Wanderer quite yet, but that was coming. I imagine you’ve heard that part of the story though: the blazing guns, the final showdown, the way that airship sliced through the dark night above the fort not even ten minutes after. It actually happened quite differently, but I’ll save that for another time. What you need to know is this: my Wanderer had already met the Brotherhood, long before the Elder and his battleship came.

It was a night much like this one—sheets of rain fell from the heavens and the sky was black as pitch save for the terrifying lightning streaking through the air.

Ok that’s not true. Wanderer tells it much differently, when they can stand to talk about it at all. Hot sun, lots of tiny gnats clouding the air, the smell of ozone and rotting flesh. You’ve got to admit my opener is way better. Point is, Laurence and Gloria never did actually _meet_ Wanderer. Not once. But, like most of us, they were directly affected by everything Wanderer did—for good or ill, who can say? And as that airship passed over Moss Rock Farmstead, leaving Laurence and Gloria right where they were, Wanderer was on their way to Cambridge, to the airport where the Brotherhood docked, to a Knighthood, and to one of the worst moments of their entire life.

To one of the worst moments in so many people’s lives.

...

Ever since that big, round plane-that-isn’t-a-plane (at least as much as Gloria insists) came through, Laurence has been picking up more and more of the work around here.

It’s not that he minds, not terribly—though they’d both be better off with Gloria working the plants; she just has a knack for it that he’s always lacked—it’s just that he’s starting to worry a little bit.

She says she doesn’t care about the not-a-plane, but of course that isn’t true. It _flies_ for gods’ sakes. Everyone who saw it cares. He’s found sketches of the thing all over the house, diagrams and what she calls “guesstimated diagrams” which are the same diagrams but with more question marks.

When he comes in with Big News (he found a Brahmin! Maybe not one of _theirs_ but still), she’s bent over their rickety little table sketching yet another version of her idea of the inside of that thing. This time it’s balloons and engines and lots of arrows that make no sense to him.

She’s always been like that—she could solve any problem, fix anything, figure anything out. She knows so much about so much: migration patterns, anatomical structure, crop yields. Papa used to tease her for being so quiet all the time, but Mama always said it was just because her brain worked so much faster than her mouth; give Gloria a pen and a problem and she’ll have it taken care of within the week.

He’s always thought she should be doing something more than farming—or, these last few years, something more than getting shoved around by raiders.

He pulls out a chair and drops into it, sliding one of her abandoned sketches across the table and holding it up in the fading afternoon light. This one has a lot of propellers.

“You remember that Weathers guy?”

Of course she does; she hates that guy. She reinforces that point with a grunt and doesn’t look up from her paper.

“He said that airship docked at the old Boston Airport. We should go.”

This time she looks up, her mouth slightly open in a small “o,” in surprise or agreement, he’s not sure.

He’s not quite like Gloria: he’s never dreamed of flying away to somewhere better, some magic world where people fly in planes and don’t fight off super mutants with shovels and shotguns. He’s never, ever thought there could be such a place to run to. But this flying ship, this Brotherhood and its promises, this _possibility—_ it’s real and it’s here and if Laurence has learned anything over the last several years, it’s that you have to take something while it’s there, you have to want and find and _do_ what you can this very second because there is nothing but this. Nothing but now.

“We should go,” he says again. Certain. Ready. There’s a feeling weighing in his chest, something between a righteous anger and a flaring hope.

...

That might’ve been one of those moments we talked about—perhaps she knew, the second those words came out of Laurence’s mouth, maybe she _knew_ that things were shifting, had shifted already.

She planned and made lists and packed bags and planned some more and made more lists and unpacked and repacked and unpacked and repacked and made a few more lists, just to be safe.

Laurence fed the cat, mostly.

There was some wavering, of course, about the farm. Do we keep the cops? Salt the land? Hand it over to the neighbours down the way?

There are no easy answers when leaving home. Even I know that.

In the end, they let the Brahmin go—who knows if it was even one of theirs to begin with?—and carried that grouchy old cat in one of Gloria’s knapsacks.

Or maybe the moment came three days later, when they walked out the door of their house, fingers dragging over the yearly scrapes in the wood to mark their heights. Or when they got to the edge of their land and looked back over the half-dead grass and crops that would son grow wild and the small grave markers along the back wall, their mother and father and grandparents and aunt. Or when they reached the bottom of the hill and looked over their shoulders and could no longer see any piece of their old lives at all.

T—Wanderer... Wanderer told me once that out of all the times their life ended, the one aboard the Prydwen was the worst. Things weren’t _happening_ that time, they said. Things were _being done._ And there is a big difference.

But they couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment it happened—the realization that nothing could ever go back to the way it was. It could have been when the vertibird docked, or when they placed that first explosive, or when they pressed the barrel of their gun into Maxon’s forehead, even after he was dead. It could have been any of those moments—and in a way, it was probably all of them—but if you can drag it out of them, Wanderer will say something else.

_I went to Danse’s old room,_ they’ll say. _There is—there_ was _a dog bowl by the bed and I thought “I will never know what he called his dog.”_

I was there though; I know that by the time we found that dog bowl, it was already too late for all of us.

Maybe the moment was when Laurence and Gloria finally made it to the Airport. Or maybe it was when Laurence strapped his helmet under his chin, or when Gloria passed some scientific gizmo to a fellow scribe. Maybe it was the first time they heard Maxson make one of his speeches, or the first time Laurence killed a civil ghoul, or the first time Gloria dissected the body.

Everybody—every single one of us—has at least one moment like that. And in the Brotherhood, well, I don’t _know_ but I noticed. Things always go one way or another: they believe in it more than they did before, or they realize they never believed in it at all.

Danse turned out to be the former, despite all the fun developments in his life. Wanderer though—they were the latter. They knew it, I knew it, the Brotherhood knew it. I don’t think anyone was surprised by the way things turned out, but it hurt like shit all the same.

Laurence and Gloria? I couldn’t really say which way they were leaning. I’d venture a guess, but a guess isn’t really the truth and it definitely isn’t a lie. Guessing isn’t really my style.

Laurence was never slow to volunteer for work, never one to linger in the back of the battlefield. But if you watched real close, you could see it in those soft brown eyes of his—not doubt, no, but something much more dangerous to the Brotherhood’s legion: compassion.

Things were a little different for Gloria though—when the work reached her, it was almost always already dead. No use wasting it, after all. Not when something could be gleaned from a ghoul to protect people from radiation, not when those mutants had killed their parents, not when the wasteland and it’s horrors had stolen from her any hope of home.

To be honest, as I so rarely am, I didn’t know Laurence and Gloria the way the teller of their tale should. I’ve had few friends, and the Samson Siblings were not among them. But I watched, the way I watch everyone. I _saw._

I could guess what would have happened, had the Samson Siblings had a choice to make. I could, but I won’t.

They weren’t there, you see. Not for the end of the story.

...

Gloria hasn’t slept more than four hours at a time in _weeks_ and the honest to gods truth is that she’s never been more excited in her life.

There’s so much to do!

She’s _this close_ to figuring out a way to utilize ghoul resistance to radioactivity for humans—she can just _feel_ the answer bumping around somewhere in the back of her head. Neriah has her running samples on test tissue every day and the answer just _has_ to be there.

She’s catalogued forty-two new types of flora. Forty-two! A third of which have some measure of rejuvenating qualities and one of which can be cultured into a paralytic.

Ingram’s shown her the ins and outs of the ship like a proud mother—every last sheet of metal, every bolt and screw. Gloria has never had so much to absorb in her life.

Still, it’s nice to have an excuse to leave the Prydwen—she never thought she’d feel that way the first time she boarded, but being on the ground again, out of earshot of Proctor Teagan and all his plans, out of range of Maxson’s speeches and Quinlan’s too-smooth-certainty... It’s easier to understand why Laurence takes so many patrols, despite looking more and more tired every time he returns.

It’s nice to be out with him, too. Nice to have time to spend together, nice to have their feet in the dirt and know that somewhere out there, the farm is standing on that same dirt, waiting for them maybe, or maybe not. Maybe now it’s only a home for their dead, for their past, but it was there and it was home and it matters that she’s on the same ground again.

It’s an easy patrol this one—a quick escort out toward that new settlement, to a nearby relay dish that Quinlain thinks might have some old military intel on the area. Ever since that old Paladin returned, Maxson’s been obsessive with Commonwealth topography. Ingram told her there was something impressive in the works, even dodged a little protocol to show her Liberty Prime, but Gloria’s having a hard time connecting all the dots right now.

Maybe when they get back, she can ask Laurence about some of his other—

She can’t hear the words, but there’s enough in the tone of the voice on the radio that she knows. Laurence knows. The whole team knows. Silence, the white noise pouring over them like heavy rain, punctuated by the broken sounds of panic.

Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.

...

 I hope you haven’t forgotten about our game.

Laurence and Gloria went home that day; they knew there was no Brotherhood left to go back to.

Laurence and Gloria died that day; they made it to Cambridge in time to find the pile of bodies Wanderer had left in our wake and were shot down from the air.

Laurence and Gloria made it to the Prydwen just in time to save a few stragglers on the ground—Ingram, Dr. Li, Lucia.

Do you know which one is true?

It’s hard to know a person—at least for me. I know when and where the Samsons were born. I know what crops they grew and how many caps they usually had in their pockets. I know where they buried their family, and how many graves are behind their house.

I know a piece of Wanderer didn’t live through the firework show that was the Prydwen going down. I know they choked on smoke searching for survivors in the wreckage and had to be dragged away. I know the way their gut twists at the sound of a hand banging desperately against a pipe.

I don’t know how Wanderer felt when they realized that what had happened to the Prydwen, to the Brotherhood, to Haylen and Ingram and Rhys was the thing _they had done._ I don’t know how Wanderer felt when they really, truly knew that the Brotherhood was gone.

And I don’t know how Laurence and Gloria felt either. I don’t know if, for the first time in months, Laurence stood a little straighter and felt a little less weight on his shoulders. I don’t know if Gloria’s first thought was of her new home or her old one. I don’t know how much anger was pressing against the hope they’d had.

I know that, eventually, they went home. Back to Moss Rock.

And I know that there are not four Brahmin there now, but seventeen. Not one cantankerous old cat, but three. And not two citizens, or five, or seven, but one hundred and sixty four. I know that the plants Neriah studied are growing along the southern edge of the farm and that Gloria has crafted watchtowers into hot air balloons. I know that Laurence has fended off raiders and mutants and deathclaws and only lost two fingers in the process. I know that a certain traitor found his way there from the Cambridge Police Department and spend all day every day digging his hands into the earth for carrots and tatos.

The Brotherhood... Wanderer...

Who can say where we’d be without them. There are people I miss, moments I wonder if we wouldn’t all be better off without the kind of changes they brought. And I can’t say whether or not Laurence and Gloria would thank them or hate them, whether or not they’d do it all again the exact same way.

I like to think I’m the ponderous sort, though. And I do have another story in mind.


End file.
